Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  Though standing right beside one another, they had to shout at each other to communicate over the screams of the machine-monsters making war on the forest. When the din of workers lagged ever so briefly, it was enough to expose them.

  Shots rang out, buzzing Davi and Ezra like bees.

  They ascended higher on the ridge, out of sight.

  Panting, Ezra said, “What now?”

  Davi smiled. Ezra sensed a Carlos Castaneda, “Teachings of Don Juan” moment coming on. He had learned to read Davi rather well over the last few days, his way of moving effortlessly between his roles as diplomat and advocate for his people, tour guide and patient teacher of children, and this—tribal shaman.

  Davi folded his legs to situate himself on the ground. He took out a pipe, stuffed it with herb, which he offered Davi, suggesting he hold it in his mouth instead, like chewing tobacco. And, chanting softly, he shifted states of consciousness as easily as he switched roles to help him bridge the gap between his people and the outside world. He rocked back and forth, reminding Ezra of the self-stimulating motions mentally retarded children often indulged in (he’d done a stint in special-ed classrooms before landing in middle school.)

  Syncing his mind with Ezra’s, Davi allowed him to see what he was doing.

  Ezra watched the ghostly ghoulish figures descend on the valley where the miners were working. They hovered before the laborers, emitting sounds of the damned.

  The workers’ reactions varied from running and screaming to standing and fighting with the implements at hand. Some aimed their pressure nozzles at the ghouls. Others tried to run them over with the tractors. The ghostly apparitions with gaping mouths lined with fangs could not be put off, and preyed on their minds. When they failed to drive off the stragglers, Davi upped his game.

  The goblins morphed into physical creatures. One, a giant anaconda, unhinged its jaws and swallowed a man whole. Another, a giant saber toothed tiger, tore at three of the laborers with its fangs and claws, shredded them as ably as the mechanized monsters shredded the forest. A prehistoric rhinoceros with wild boar tusks and horns, tackled the mechanical earth movers head on, dented them, capsized them, and drove its horns through metal doors clear through to the drivers inside the machines.

  When the vision came to an end, Ezra ran back down the ridge to the clearing where he could see the miners up close.

  The heavy equipment had been decimated.

  Bodies lay in pieces, some already being carried off by jaguars. The big cats snarled defensively at Ezra lest he had any ideas of taking their catch from them.

  Ezra expected to see an abandoned site, equipment undamaged, perhaps ripe for the pillaging. He had read about thought projections used by monks during medieval times to ward off attacks, and turn their enemies on themselves.

  But this was something more. He saw no evidence that the workers had been tricked into doing this to one another.

  When Davi finally joined him in the valley, Ezra was walking through the wreckage still unable to fully process everything that had gone on. “What happened here?”

  Davi explained, “There was a time when the visions were enough to get them to run off, or to turn on one another like mad dogs. But they learned to cover their bodies with clothes in case the plants rubbing up against them were triggering the visions. They learned to wear masks over their faces in case the aerosols from the vaporized mud and dust-filled and pollen-filled air was the cause. They added guards with guns in case natives were shooting them with poison darts. Finally, they took drugs that made them fearless and brazen, and they laughed off the attacks.

  “And there will be talk now of attacking nearby villages and killing everyone, just to cover their bases. So, as you can see, I have really exhausted this approach. Sometimes, even the aid of the gods is not enough.”

  “What will you do now?” Ezra asked.

  “Tensions over the clash of interests have intensified in recent months,” Davi said. “The military has been deployed along the dividing line where farms brush up against virgin forests, to discourage farmers and other big business interests from bulldozing further into the jungle. But I fear that long-term success may come more from winning the farmers over and not putting police between them and the natives.

  “Finding a sustainable way to harvest the riches of the Amazon for future generations remains the paramount challenge. Too many powerful interests think not in terms of sustainability, but how much quick profit they can rape from the land, thinking nothing of the long-term deficits they leave for those coming in their wake, to say nothing of future generations.”

  So many causes, so little time, Ezra thought, but he didn’t say as much out loud. The plight of the Yanomami was a worthy enough cause to rally behind, but it joined a long list of ever-proliferating causes competing for ever-less mindshare among charitable souls. They were already overburdened with how much space in their minds could be occupied by concern for loss in general, loss of ________ -- fill in the blank how you want.

  ***

  Ezra hiked back to the village alongside Davi in silence. What more could be said? Indeed, what more could be done? Already, taking ideology to the battle lines had meant escalating tensions, as Davi noted, between all the competing interest groups, now at one another’s throats in a war with too many fronts to track. None of these countless skirmishes were being covered in the news. Major media interests and the powers that be collaborated to keep anything truly noteworthy out of the news, lest advocates swarm in from all directions and hinder their private Earth-raping agendas.

  How many people even knew that America now imported more oil from Africa than the Middle East, and that since 1990, over a billion dollars a year had been spent to install the necessary infrastructure to extract oil from a continent—which was formerly largely inaccessible—using the latest technologies that now made it quite accessible? How many were cognizant of just what a bunch of carpetbaggers set free on such a scale could do to a continent outside of international regulations and scrutiny and human rights organizations getting involved, without forces being mobilized to counterbalance greedy business interests which saw doing things “the right way” as doing things “the costly way?”

  The truth was out there, as Fox Mulder would say, for those willing to do a little digging. Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, documented this drama. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law catalogued the more petty dealings between individual traders and smugglers skirting the law, yuppies going for their share of the pie, playing the same game on an individual level that the transnationals played. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa took a longer view of imperial forces steamrolling over Africa using their propaganda machine to ensure the world that the most humanitarian acts were being carried out, all the while committing genocide of tens of millions of people to get at the rubber, and other national resources of the continent.

  From Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz, to The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman—so long as you were willing to arm yourself with Google and Amazon.com searches, you could make your brain bleed from the horrors. But you had to be willing to turn off the Big Brother boob tube, and then, after educating yourself, you had to become Davi—a shapeshifting spirit.

  The world right now didn’t need and couldn’t survive any less from him. And here he was, getting his native groove on in the middle of nowhere, wondering if he’d plunked himself down in the thick of things in the perfect place to play the role of the empowered activist. Or if indeed the spirits—like the ones Davi called on to counterbalance mining interests, had a place they needed Ezra to be right now, where he could be used more effectively.

  He used to laugh about people who used to say “spirit has called me to go to _____ to work with the ________ people and do _______.” The cute but quaint religiously minded folks. They were harmless enough, if deluded in their self-importance. After less than a week living
among the Yanomami, and getting his head filled by Davi on life As It Is—not as it had been filtered for him by big media interests—he was beginning to wonder how anyone could right-fit themselves to time and place, to be the most empowered activist possible, in the absence of such spiritual guidance.

  Right now, Ezra didn’t care if he got the guidance from chewing on whacko weed or dancing in circles like a whirling dervish. Whatever worked. Now that he realized just what he was up against, it didn’t seem enough just to pick a side of the battle, among so many, and go to war.

  In the chaos, spiritual guidance was more necessary than ever. And atheist that Ezra was, Davi’s shamanic ability to access other dimensions, alternate realities, in an almost scientific way, using techniques of consciousness bolstered through years of meditative practice and herbal medicine, seemed like just the ticket to the help he needed.

  While he was tolerant of the more traditionally religious approach, the prayers and practices of so many of the world’s religions turned him off, since they accompanied so many prejudices and prescriptive formulas for how to live life that seemed entirely unenlightened.

  But Davi’s portal to Narnia-like worlds came with none of that baggage. If only Ezra could up his game, and learn from his shapeshifter everything he needed to be a truly responsible world citizen.

  ***

  Ezra arrived back at camp to powwow with Grace, as was their custom at the end of the day, to review how things had gone, the lessons learned. She was amused by his determination to call upon spiritual guidance in order to sharpen the tip of the spear on his resolve and his ability to affect the world positively. But only because she was one step ahead of him. “We’re meant to go to Sierra Leone next. We’ve done all we can here.”

  “But how—?”

  She winked at him and he realized that in her own meetings with remarkable men and women, undertaken in his absence, she’d not only arrived at the same conclusions, but evolved the necessary aptitudes along the way to pull off what he himself couldn’t yet do. Maybe all the extra intellectual baggage was holding him in check; he was the philosopher and intellectual between them. They had both agreed from day one it would maximize their learning curves to minimize their exposure to one another while there, and so their tendencies to fall into old mindsets and familiar forms of role play. He could see now that their approach had proven a good deal smarter than even he had imagined.

  Maybe it was the glint in her eyes, which shone like polished marbles. The way she weaved the piece of clothing as she talked, with an inner peace rivaling a yogi. The effortless smile. The confidence that all would work out and all would be shown them in good time. Maybe it was in the more confident lovemaking as they stole into the fields around the village late at night. Whatever consortium of behavior artifacts which came together to push him past the tipping point, he found himself nodding at her on the Sierra Leone thing, and trusting that indeed they had done everything they could here, though he had nothing to base that on but her words.

  She said, “I’ve already downloaded everything we’ve shared with one another in a couple dozen blogs, all pointing to the in-depth authoritative book which they can find on Amazon and purchase on Kindle or on hard-cover. The media blitz is just beginning. I will do virtual interviews from wherever we are, cutting in the still and video footage we have from the Yanomami village. And my agent will set follow-up interviews based on the popularity of the prior ones, which will be analyzed, dissected, mutilated, and infiltrated the way this forest has been colonized for the intel needed to take my game to the next level, and widen the circle of followers from Facebook to Vanity Square.”

  Ezra stared at her, flabbergasted. This was the girl that not too long ago was half dead on the walk from the plane before she even got off the tarmac at the airport.

  She had summoned in herself the energy of Kali to fight off the world. She had learned to animate her bones like Davi, spell casting youth over an eighty-some-year-old body. Whichever divining method she’d used to find that deep wellspring coursing through her, found it she had.

  And suddenly, their roles had changed once again. He was no longer her mentor and worldly teacher, taking a proverbial machete to her naiveté, bolstering her journalism with a depth of character and vision to accompany her breadth. Maybe he was still all that intellectually, but she now transcended reason in her ability to course correct herself, making her subtly, from here on out, his mentor and spiritual travel guide.

  They were on a plane headed to Sierra Leone the following day. And he couldn’t wait to hear the story of her transformation. How could he have missed it in such detailed retellings of their adventures?

  TEN

  “What’s she doing?”

  Drew joined Lady Harding on the second story balcony. He shared with her the view of the dump trucks backing up and then divesting themselves of their cargo in large piles on the driveway to either side of Robin. She commenced raking the gravel from there.

  “I’m not sure I’m up for this.”

  “If it’s another end-of-world scenario, I’ll go down.” Lady Harding straightened her hair.

  “No, thank you. I’ll go down.”

  ***

  Drew arrived in the driveway in time to have to dodge one of the dump trucks, which nearly buried him alive; he wondered why he hadn’t chosen the easy way out.

  He stomped up to Robin. “What are you—?”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish the question. He glanced down at the image formed by the colored tiles, each one no more than an inch square, the mosaic easily six, seven yards to a side. “What is this?” he said.

  “Just a way I’ve found to extend the range of my feelers when I’ve allowed myself to get overly depleted.” She glanced up at the dump truck drivers guiding the fallout from their buckets by checking out the passenger side windows as they inched away from her. She shouted, “I need more tiles!”

  When they didn’t hear her over the sounds of the hydraulics and the spilling gravel, she waved at them with her rake, took steps closer to them, and shouted louder. “More tiles! More tiles!”

  The instant the driveway was filled with more tiles, Robin telekinetically flipped them and slid them into place.

  Drew glanced down from the departing dump trucks that were making way for the ones with fresh loads, and followed the mural taking shape below his feet. An Amazon native, from the looks of him, sat, legs folded, seemingly in a trance. Light seemed to radiate from the center of his forehead.

  As Drew continued to step out the picture, he saw a mining crew devastating the rain forest—and then coming under attack from ghostly demons.

  Picking up the pace, further into the mural, the ghostly demons gave way to flesh and bone monsters. He gulped. He craned his head to the newly arrived truck drivers, and shouted, “No more tiles! No more tiles!”

  ELEVEN

  “Sister Gretchen, save me!” Mort shouted, terror-stricken, judging by his tone. “I’m being sucked back into one of those past life memories.”

  “It’s the Renaissance Faire, you oaf,” Gretchen replied.

  Mort pulled out his .44 and held it up to the face of the man who had walked up to him wearing a green dress over his pants, riding just above the knees, and carrying a long bow.

  “Good morrow,” the man in green managed without flinching. “Tarry a while!” He bowed to Mort and moved on.

  Mort protested, “He doesn’t know what a gun is. I tell you, this is medieval Europe. They are not acting!”

  Gretchen grabbed Mort’s chin, and turned his face toward the parking lot, where he could see parked Hum-Vs and limousines, Porsches and VW Beetles.

  Mort finally acquiesced. “I suppose that sets the matter to rest.” He suddenly felt even more awkward and out of place than before, now that he realized he may actually be here a while. “Hmm, what does one do to fit in around here?”

  The swordsman beside him, dressed in a lace-up shirt, uttered, "Wench, if ye
do fetch me an ale, I shall love thee forever."

  “Never mind,” Mort said, “I know everything I need to know.”

  Santini made a sour face. “We better go see how the science boys are making out. Now we have some decent cover from the men in black, there’s the matter of finding them what they need. It was tough enough in modern times.”

  On their way to finding Milton and Fabio, they passed The Barrel of Bedlam. Fair goers loaded themselves in a barrel, then careened down the hill screaming. “That looks like fun,” Mort mumbled.

  They passed the archery range next. “I might have to give that a try.” The ordinarily disagreeable Mort examined the range of long bows, crossbows, and short bows and the experts wielding them.

  At the Captains Cannons stations, a line of folks manning their cannons desperately tried to sink a pirate ship on the lake. “Definitely have to give that a go,” Mort said, continuing to perk up.

  At the next event, the contestants were catapulting frogs. “This place really isn’t as bad as all that.” Mort still sounded as if he wasn’t entirely convinced he could relax his guard.

  Next, they passed the Da Vinci’s Flying Machine event, where contestants competed against one another with their pedal-powered airplanes, looking more kite and dragon-fly than plane. Mort glanced at the medieval wood shop where he could give his own designs a go, and bring them to life. “Ah, go on. I’ll catch up with you.”

  They lost Aala at the knife and ax throwing event. She spat on her hands, and exclaimed, “As the crow is made for stewing, the dog is made for kicking.” Presumably she was referring to feeling entirely at home flinging axes, Santini thought. She picked up an ax from the table and hurled it well enough to give the wench tied to the target a chance to reflect on her wicked ways before meeting her maker.

  “Let’s hope they don’t get so caught up in the drama of the moment they forget about the one with the men in black,” Santini said. “There’s nothing stopping them from donning costumes to get closer to us.”